Free online tutoring service to expand, help Nova Scotia students beyond pandemic

Rebeccah Raphael poses for a photo outside her Halifax home on Friday, May 1, 2020. Raphael, and other tutors, are volunteering their time to help elementary and junior high school students during the COVID-19 crisis. - Ryan Taplin

A free tutoring service based out of Halifax that launched to provide learning support to students during the COVID-19 pandemic is expanding, with the goal of continuing to help students even beyond the pandemic.

Launched in late April, The Halifax Helpers is a free, volunteer-run online tutoring service that offers educational support for elementary and junior high school students in Nova Scotia. Currently there are about 50 tutors hosting roughly 300 online Zoom tutoring sessions a week in areas such as English, French, math, science, visual art and music.

Initially, the goal of the tutoring service was to help students with at-home learning while schools in the province remain closed, according to The Halifax Helpers founder Rebeccah Raphael.

But now, the volunteer tutors behind The Halifax Helpers are looking to expand their offerings and continue to help students post-pandemic as well, Raphael said, seeing how the need for additional learning support “is not going to go away” once the pandemic ends.

“People will always need access to educational support. There will always be people who need this,” she said.

“So, we’ve kind of decided as a group that we’re going to try and extend the project into next year as a lot of schools will be going online but also into the future to try and make it something bigger so we can reach more people and help more individuals.”

The Halifax Helpers founder Rebeccah Raphael said she hopes she and her team of volunteer tutors can help students for years to come. - Contributed

For the expansion, the team is hoping to launch a new and improved website, with a section dedicated specifically to help newcomers learn English. Raphael said they’re currently in discussions with a few organizations in Nova Scotia who they hope to partner with to offer the ESL support.

“There are a lot of people who just want help learning English, getting better at English, having conversational English, so that’s (a) really popular course that we’re seeing tutored,“ she said.

They’ve launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with the costs associated with developing the new website, Raphael said, including hiring a web developer and designer.

“Once that website is set up, everything will be automated. Our goal is for people to be able to make an account for The Halifax Helpers and for people to be able to log in and have all their sessions,” she said.

Raphael said she’s “overwhelmed” with the community support the tutors have had since the launch of The Halifax Helpers, adding she hopes they can reach their $2,000 GoFundMe goal to continue to help students for years to come.

“I think that this is something that we can really expand to help so many people and every parent can relate to wanting the best for their child, and our services appear to help their child be their best, so it’s a great cause to donate to.”

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